in May 1921 Mollie Burkhart He was summoned near a valley in the Osage reservation, the Native American tribe to which he belonged. A body just turned up there and someone assumed they could identify it. Of course it can: the dead woman older sister Anna Brownhas been missing for a week; He had a bullet hole in his head. He wasn’t the first family member Mollie had lost recently, and it wouldn’t be the last.
After all, in the first half of the 20s, Dozens of Osage murdered in cold blood, poisoned, or executed, or simply removed from circulation. It was initially revealed that the mystery surrounding their deaths was a conspiracy. David Grann investigated ‘Moon Killers: Oil, Money, Murder, and the Creation of the FBI’The extraordinary book on which Martin Scorsese’s monumental new film is based. ‘The Moon Killers’, starring the director’s two favorite actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, will be released in the coming days, months before its release. Increase award nominations.
This wasn’t the first time the tribe made headlines; In fact, just a few years ago, they made the news by becoming the community with the highest per capita income in the world. His wealth began to take shape a little earlier, They were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in 1871 and resettled in a reservation in Oklahoma. According to Grann’s book, experts consider the area “rocky, barren and completely unsuitable for cultivation.”
However, decades later, it turned out that these lands had expanded. some of the largest oil fields in the country, and whoever wanted to extract it would have to pay the Osage, and a lot of money. At the beginning of the new century, members of the tribe built it themselves. luxury terracotta mansions, They employed white drivers and maidsThey sent their children to the most prestigious private schools.
Inevitably, the scent of the bills attracted numerous con artists and corrupt businessmen, but the master plan to rob the Osage was devised by the United States government; From their offices unable to manage own moneyand they were appointed teachers who, on paper, were responsible for supervising and authorizing their expenditure, but in practice were devoted to this work. They defraud them in various ways. It didn’t take long for a massive network of judges, lawyers, businessmen, and doctors to spread throughout the state of Oklahoma and line the pockets of the public. He plundered the Osage.
But stealing the source of all this wealth was not that easy. To change hands Crude oil rich lands could not be bought or sold, newly inherited; In other words, they would remain Osage property unless someone outside the tribe managed to integrate into the line of succession. At this point, what happened in the Osage Nation becomes one of the most perverse events in history. genocide of American Indians: To gain the right to work the land, white men and women had to marry tribal members and then wait for their spouses to die or cause their deaths. And then Grann writes: “The richest people per capita in the world were the people killed the most in the world.”
In all, Mollie Burkhart both lost and lost under strange circumstances. her three sisters are like her mother. As deaths occurred around him, he hired private detectives to solve them, but years passed and neither they nor the local police got results due to incompetence or corruption. Then, in 1925, J. Edgar Hoover He decided that these crimes might be an ideal showcase for the new police agency he headed, soon to be known as the FBI; So what interested him was not seeking justice without doing anything. an image campaign. By then Molly was already more dead than alive. He had been poisoned for years.
Mollie’s personal tragedy and the role her husband Ernest Burkhart might play in it form the backbone Scorsese chose for ‘The Moon Killers’.Lily Gladstone plays her and DiCaprio plays him; They both offer great work.; This is a notable difference from Grann’s original; is a procedural intrigue that focuses primarily on the FBI investigation and, in particular, the process that leads to the discovery of the film’s star agent, Tom White, played by Jesse Plemons. “a party of bribery and exploitation.” Far from treating the identity of the perpetrators as a mystery as the book does, the film practically incorporates this into its premise. However, both agree that justice was not served at all.
Several men were eventually convicted and imprisoned, and Hoover agency’s first major victory and guaranteeing the injection of funds to fuel it; This was his goal, and when he achieved his goal, he closed the case. Officially, the Osage massacre resulted in 24 deaths in five years; But expert estimates say there have been hundreds of murders in two decades. “Almost all elements of society accomplices of the criminal system” Grann writes. And many escaped without taking responsibility and with all their money stolen.